2026-4 – What I Know Now – July
Note: There are cautions on nest cam sites warning of potential violence on bird nests and the emotional toll. Let me be clearer, by “emotional toll” I mean “sadness.” Life frequently ends unpleasantly on nests.
July closed with only one Island Creek Osplet alive. He is alive because his dad, LB, will retrieve Alewives peeled from a flash-frozen cube of bait-fish and lobbed into the creek. LB shares his retrievals roughly 50/50 with Junior, the first Island Creek chick since 2022 to live long enough to fly.
LB has been far and away the best fisher of Island Creek. Unaided, he fed himself and Lily through spring, added chicks in June and kept two alive for 7 weeks, up to the brink of flying. Five other nests in Island Creek hatched chicks and only two chicks, both in Nest 5, ever reached the lip of their nest, where that final survivor perished, emaciated, mid-July.
LB had looked haggard by then, he was dragging, making fewer and fewer deliveries of smaller and smaller fish. Junior was becoming gaunt, bullied by Big Sis, the larger chick, already actively wingercizing–building muscles to fly.
But by July 18, the extended lack of fish had even slowed Big Sis’s hopping and flapping. In late afternoon, Lily left. She did not return that night to the branch overlooking her nest. She was not around the next morning.
This is what I know now: It is time to ditch anthropomorphism. Nests significantly differ from nurseries. Ospreys perform an egg-to-fledge drama every year and their species survival is not dependent on that nest. Their survival is dependent upon returning next year.
This is what I know now: Starvation stops the show, no matter if it’s Act One or Three. The survival message is: You cannot fall short of your body’s needs for a successful migration.
This is what I know now: Fish are jumping in Island Creek from March through May. Males verily crow, circling the lower Potomac with long, fat, tail-waving fish in their talons. Chicks hatch late May through early June. coinciding with an abrupt, devastating reduction of fish.
The morning after Lily left, LB perched on a loblolly above my porch, looking into his nest with a small fish in his talons. His two squeeing, starving chicks hit a frenzied pitch each time he touched down in the nest. Twice he lurched back out as Big Sis chick went for the fish but the third time she grabbed it and LB released it. Big Sis adapted immediately to self-feeding.
Junior, by now automatically submissive to Big Sis, didn’t fight for the fish. But he’d kept growing as he reached 7 weeks, so he’d figured out some way to get fed something. All that day and the next day he stood sturdily beside his sister squeeing for more fish. By evening of the second day of squeeing, LB retrieved a frozen Alewife bobbing beneath his nest.
By the next evening, July 21, LB had bulked-up and so had the kids. Lily, absent for three days, swooped beneath LB as he launched off his North Copse branch to snatch another bobbing Alewife, which she grabbed for herself. She looked awful. She was starving.
Previous Episode: 2026-3: Island Creek, Hot and Dry
Next Episode: 2026-5: The Whole Family Is Here
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